Award 2017Advisory Board

Amanda Abi Khalil (Lebanon)

'I have been focusing my curatorial projects on socially engaged practices and exhibitions that critically address modes of production and exhibition in the art world today. Through Temporary Art Platform, the organization I have founded, I am aiming at shifting artistic and curatorial discourse towards social and contextual concerns in Lebanon through residencies, research projects and commissions.'

Amanda de la Garza Mata (Mexico)

Anne Szefer Karlsen (Norway)

'My interests are in artistic and curatorial collaborations as well as developing and changing the language that surrounds art productions of today, – linguistically, spatially and structurally.'szefer.net,kmd.uib.no

Bhavisha Panchia (South Africa)

Bhavisha Panchia is a curator and researcher within the field of visual and audio culture. Originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, her research interests are leveled at anti/decolonial practices, global South-North relations, production and circulation of (digital) media, including the politics of sound and music in relation to diasporic formations. Of concern is the ways in which knowledge is given precedence, and systems which determine who is given the right to speak, and the right to be heard.nothingtocommit.org

Camila Marambio (Chile)

'In 2010, after a week shadowing a group of conservation biologists on the main isle of Tierra del Fuego (TdF) in Southern Patagonia I approached the Wildlife Conservation Society - Chile (WCS) with the proposal to develop a program to integrate artists and humanities scholars into WCS Chile’s existing scientific research teams. This was the birth of Ensayos, a nomadic research program that enables experimental interdisciplinary practice as a model to deal with ecological issues in TdF. As its name suggests, the methodology of Ensayos is one of rehearsal or essay
Directing Ensayos has re-oriented my curatorial practice towards an approach that I consider a performative cura sui, or care of the self. Notionally, my understanding of the self is derived from philosophical concerns emerging out of eco-relational philosophy and post-humanist cultural theory, particularly related to the ethics of living and dying in a time of ecological crisis. Pragmatically, it is the interdisciplinary collaborations of Ensayos and my personal experience undergoing chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a stem-cell transplant that shape my sense of the self as an entangled coming into being of multi-agential forces.'ensayostierradelfuego.net

Candice Hopkins (New Mexico/Canada)

'Being from the north, as a curator and writer I am often drawn to art from the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. Nunavut, the largest territory in Canada, has more people who identify as working artists than anywhere else in the country, yet this is a statistic that most artists living in major urban centers don’t know. For many artists working there, this is not a periphery or a margin but a center of artistic practices, of pedagogies that resonate from land, language and culture. I have moved from the north to the Southwest of the United States a number of years ago. This is another landscape known for its extreme—heat and sand instead of ice and snow. it is said that New Mexico is the state that most Americans forget is a part of the U.S.. This makes it all the more appealing to me. Also appealing is that the strength of practices in Albuquerque, where I live, is not visual art, but experimental sound and music. Small spaces spring up and thrive on audiences of 40 dedicated listeners. It’s in these small, sweaty venues where I have learned the most about “art” in the last few years and where I have learned to open my ears so that I might better experience what’s around me.'documenta14, fillip.ca, Chapter 5, “If History Moves at the Speed of its Weapons,”, studiorev.org, sitesantafe.org

Cecilia Guida (Italy)

'My curatorial interests concern socially engaged artistic practices and the relationships between participatory art and radical pedagogy in the contemporary public sphere. Through UNIDEE-University of Ideas, the international residential program that I direct and curate for Fondazione Pistoletto-Cittadellarte, I am experimenting an educational model based on the meeting of critical theory, activism and artistic practice, not through subordinate relationships but rather through levels of interaction, exchanges and reciprocal interference among the participants and through seminars, workshops and research projects.' cittadellarte.it/unidee, cecilia guida

Dana Whabira (Zimbabwe)

Dana Whabira is a Zimbabwean artist, architect and cultural facilitator who lives and works in Harare. She is founder of Njelele Art Station, an independent project space that focuses on contemporary, experimental and public art practice that intervenes into the city itself. Located in the bustling car mechanic district (on the fringes) of Harare, it acts as an urban laboratory where ideas are generated and resonate out into the city through projects that provoke discussion and engage with the general public. Through her work she revisits the physical/cultural landscape to recontextualize meaning and narrative beyond binaries that have been pre-inscribed through controlling power structures. njelele.com

Ethel Baraona (Spain)

Ethel Baraona Pohl likes to smell books. She doesn't like vanilla ice cream… but those grassy notes with a tang of acids with hint of vanilla and mustiness are irresistible for her. Since a youngster she has been smelling printed pages. Now she is also convinced that networked words have quantum scents and that we all are part of them. And by smelling books and digging from one page to the other, researching on the issue of artistic and urban practices, she has learnt about their political and social impact, and how these kind of practices can be active tools for protest, to create awareness, to enhance dialogue, and more important, how artistic practices can be tools for taking action. dpr-barcelona.com

Eva Barois de Caevel (France/Senegal)

Independent curator, Curator at RAW Material Company + coordinator of the RAW Academy (Senegal), Editor for the Institute for Human Activities (Congo, The Netherlands, Belgium), Founding member of the international curatorial collective Cartel de Kunst (based in Paris).
« ‘Dealing with today’ and ‘reshaping the present’, that is: doing your job with the power relationships between continents, countries, peoples and individuals in mind ; and try to transform them, if you are lucky enough to have any sort of power yourself. »rawmaterialcompany.org, humanactivities.org, curatorsintl.org, a-desk.org

Francesco Scasciamacchia (Mexico/Italy)

Gilly Karjevsky (Israel/Germany)

'​My practice exists in the intersection of art, architecture and the politics of urban society.​ For the past decade I focused on public space projects, programs and environments, working independently but in collaboration with political and cultural institutions in Europe and the Middle East. I approach curating as a critical spatial practice, and so most of my projects, vary in context as they may be, all concern both communities and local politics in an attempt to bring them a little bit closer together.'

Grégory Castéra (France)

'I have been focusing my curatorial practice on the forms of collective intelligence. In Council, the organization I co-founded with Sandra Terdjman, we believe that assembling different knowledge from the arts, sciences and civil society can foster new understandings of societal issues. Council’s programme revolves around long-term inquiries that produce exhibitions, publications and events, as well as commissioning new artworks.'

Hoor Al-Qasimi (UAE)

Iliana Fokianaki (Greece)

'I aim my exhibitions to function as agents that operate in between the domain of the political and the artistic, in which core notions that define our understanding of the world can be challenged and redefined. My curatorial practice is focused on the concept of the state, and the definition of citizenship, class and identity. What is the “state”, both as a governmental construct and as a “state of existence”? State of Concept Athens the institution i founded in 2013, arose from this question. What other classifications are possible and imaginable that can define our place in the world beyond or parallel to the state, the nation, the city or the community? Through the propositions of artists, I aim to recompose such concepts that are linked with national, class and other identities. Through my role as a curator I wish to articulate the frameworks in which new classification systems arise, through propositions that can activate and challenge our past, present and future. Exhibitions operate as propositions of new institutionalities, in which new artistic compositions of identity, language, and history form a new state in becoming.'stateofconcept.org,

Julia Morandeira (Spain)

Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga is a researcher and curator based in Madrid, where she directs the escuelita at the CA2M-Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, an informal school devoted to collective study and new forms of producing knowledges. She has recently developed the curatorial research Canibalia, a visceral exploration of figure of the cannibal though history, and Be careful with each other so we can be dangerous together, a conversation project on affective forms of institutionality.escuelita del CA2M, Canibalia, Declinación Magnética

Manuela Moscoso (Ecuador/Brazil)

Manuela is a curator that mostly emphasizes speculative thinking and actions in order to privilege imagination. Weather organizing exhibitions, commissioning or initiating projects, she sees collaboration intrinsic to her practice. In the last years, Manuela has been investigating notions of deployment, circulation, exercise, and resonance.zarigueyaenelalabado.org, rivet-rivet.net, museotamayo.org

Margarida Mendes (Portugal)

Margarida Mendes is a curator, educator and climate activist. In 2009 she founded The Barber Shop project space in Lisbon, hosting a programme of seminars and residencies dedicated to artistic and philosophical research. Exploring the overlap between cybernetics, philosophy, sciences and experimental film, her personal research investigates the dynamic transformations of climate and its impact on societal structures and cultural production.

Martina Angelotti (Italy)

'My practice creates and produces curatorial projects with a focus on public art and socially engaged practices. These are formed through exhibitions, workshops and context-based investigations that reflect and negotiate their role in the public realm. Since the end of 2013 as Artistic Director of Careof, a no profit organization based in Milan, and alongside the independent project ON born in Bologna in 2007, as co-founder and curator, I have considered the relevance of reformulating a vision for the roles and expectations an artistic institution and project has to embrace today to build up a new imagination of the future.' careof.org, onpublic.it

Michael Birchall (UK)

Michael Birchall holds a collaborative post with Tate Liverpool where he is curator of public practice, and Senior Lecturer in Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. His research interests include: socially engaged art, participatory practices, community art and exhibition histories. He has produced a range of socially engaged projects that challenge our understanding of gallery practices, and has published widely in journals, catalogues and monographs.Michael Birchall, recent project

Moses Serubiri (Uganda)

'Over the last few years, I have considered ideas, histories, as well as creative production beyond the category of contemporary art. This has directed my focus to recent social and political histories in Uganda. I have organized panel discussions on urban and non-English languages, local exhibition histories, and compiled a book related to the history of women's protest in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. I have, also, produced a radio documentary on recorded music in Uganda, thinking through legislation on censorship and class struggle in the country.'KLA ART 014

Nat Muller (The Netherlands)

'I am independent curator and writer interested in how specific socio-political conditions shape and necessitate artistic practices and a certain aesthetic. For many years I’ve been obsessing about how the politics of representation operate in contexts that are under pressure, more specifically in the Middle East. Increasingly this powder keg seems to be extending to the entire globe. In this time of global disquiet, now more than ever, we are in need of an imaginary, of something that allows us to read and think against the grain, and that keep us perpetually hungry with curiosity and anticipation.'natmuller.com

Osei Bonsu (Ghana/UK)

Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian curator and writer based in London. His activities encompass exhibition programming, publishing and cultural strategy in the field of visual arts. He has developed projects focused on transnational histories of art, collaborating with museums, galleries and private collections in Europe, Asia and Africa. Through his research, Bonsu focuses on questions of progress and the conception of modernity against the backdrop of social, cultural, and economical transformation in the
20th and 21st centuries. In 2017, he will curate the 10th edition of Satellites, The Economy of Living Things, a multi-site exhibition at Jeu de Paume (Paris) and CAPC: Centre for Contemporary Art (Bordeaux).

Pablo José Ramírez (Guatemala)

Pablo José Ramirez is a curator, political theorist and writer, currently based in London. His main research interests, lays around notions of translation , silence and future, on postcolonial contexts. Ramirez looks for politically engaged practices, which tense the limits between non-rational and scientific knowledge, where colonial and planetary memory becomes a place for emancipation.coleccioncisneros.org, newschool.edu, gasworks.org.uk, miamirail.org, tranzitdisplay.cz

Qinyi Lim (Hong Kong)

'I am interested in pluralistic vocabularies and how we deploy them in the everyday. My curatorial projects usually seek to destabilise or question such vernacular through socially engaged practices and exhibitions. My current research in Asia seeks to explore the linkages exchanges between archipelagos beyond that of geopolitics starting from Southeast Asia.'

Renée Mboya (Kenya)

Renée Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work is concerned with embodied memory and the use of autobiography in contemporary narratives to rehabilitate misrepresentations in history.

Simon Soon (Malaysia)

‘I characterise my research very broadly as social art history, which reflects an interest in approaching 'art history from below'. I also have a broader interest in Asian modernities as a discursive method and in the broader field of art historiography. Principally, questions about spatial-visual subjectivities and social formations, in relation to art and cultural history, animate the kind of research I do. I also have a strong interest in examining art or cultural phenomenon through understanding them as intersections of history, memory and mythology. I work primarily as an art historian, teaching at the University of Malaya, while also devoting my time to Malaysia Design Archive, an education platform and online repository on 20th-century visual culture'malaysiadesignarchive.org

Sohrab Kashani (Iran)

Sohrab Kashani is an interdisciplinary artist and an independent curator based in Tehran. Kashani is the Director of Pejman Foundation: Argo Factory and Director of Programming at Pejman Foundation. He was the Founder and Director of Sazmanab; non-profit project space and residency program established in 2008 and on hiatus since 2016.Pejman Foundation: Argo Factory, Pejman Foundation, Sazmanab

Tang Fu Kuen (Singapore/Thailand)

TOK (Russia)

TOK is a curatorial duo based in St Petersburg and founded by Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits in 2010 as a platform for conducting interdisciplinary projects in the fields of contemporary art and social sciences. TOK’s research-based art and educational projects have a strong social component and deal with current issues that are widely discussed both in Russia and internationally such as migration, public space and citizens, development of education, deprivation of social resources, forming collective memory, use of natural resources, growing role of the media in the global society, changing political climate and many others.tok-spb.org

Victoria Ivanova (Ukraine)

Vuth Lyno (Cambodia)

Vuth Lyno is an artist, curator and Artistic Director of Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh’s only artist-run space. His artistic and curatorial practice is primarily participatory in nature, exploring collective learning and experimentation, and sharing of multiple voices through exchanges. His interest intersects micro histories, notions of community, and production of social situations. Vuth holds a Master of Art History from the State University of New York, Binghamton, supported by Fulbright fellowship.sasaart.info, sasabassac.com

Xiaoyu Weng (China/USA)

'My curatorial, editorial and writing practice focuses on the intersections of aesthetic, political, economic, social, and technological experimentations. Through collaborations with a diverse group of practitioners, my work highlights the utopic and imaginative power of art and the transnational, multi-faceted and anti-hegemonic experience it provides.'xiaoyuweng.com

Yazid Anani (Palestine, Armenia, Iran, Usa)

Yazid Anani was born in 1975, Ramallah. He is an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and the Master Program in Urban Planning and Landscape - Birzeit University, Palestine. Yazid Anani chaired the Academic Council of the International Art Academy Palestine 2010 - 2012. He is part of several collectives, and projects such as Decolonizing Architecture and Ramallah Syndrome and has curated and co-curated several projects such as Urban Cafés, Palestinian Cities - Visual Contention and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions of Cities Exhibition and took part in several art projects. Anani has lectured and published internationally on issues of architecture and urban transformations, colonial spaces and power relations, public art and public spaces and art education. He is also the director of Public Program at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah.qattanfoundation.org

Yesomi Umolu (USA/The Netherlands)

Yesomi Umolu is Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, where she also lectures on art history and visual culture. Umolu is invested in supporting interdisciplinary production, discourses on global contemporary art and progressive pedagogical models.yesomiumolu.com